How to pronounce French words in Dutch

Last summer I spent my holiday in the Jura, a beautiful province in France. Before going there I signed up for online French lessons to make sure that I wouldn’t regret not having refreshed my French. That had happened many times before, so I finally did what so many of my clients do: take online lessons! And beside the fact that it is easy and fun to learn a language online it is also very effective. This summer I finally felt more confident in speaking French. I could have a relaxed conversation with the French people in the streets or in a café and tell a story using the past tense. My goodness, how important it is for me to know the tenses. I was also very happy with the extra vocabulary that I had rehearsed with Stephanie. Of course I kept making a dozen mistakes, but that didn’t matter. The main goal was to communicate with confidence in the native language.

French loan words

While taking a series of Skype lessons taught by my very professional French teacher Stephanie in Montpellier, I ended up sharing a couple of French words with her that are used permanently in our Dutch language. Stephanie was quite impressed that we used so many French loan words. To name a few: toilet, trottoir, chauffeur, station, entree, s.v.p (s’il vous plaît). At the same time I realized that especially French words that would give my learners of Dutch a headache, because most of them never learned to speak French.

English pronunciation

Many of my learners from South Africa, the US but also from Sweden and Finland, had no clue about how to pronounce a French loan word. Take for example the word ‘station’. Most would trust that the English pronunciation would suffice, but that is not the case. Although we do have many English words in our language, we do stick to French words often: sta’sjon (pronounce the ‘a’ as in ‘arm’ and stress the second syllable).

I tried to categorize the types of French loan words in Dutch:

Exactly the same words in pronunciation and spelling:trottoir, merci, toilet, surprise, station, biscuit.